Looking back, my greatest regret is not that I didn’t love them enough (to the brink of insanity and back again), but that I couldn’t save them from themselves.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in...

…she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk’s bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs,...

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this...

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

A dog’s good for filling a grief-dug hole.””In the Shape of Shep

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what...

It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It...

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity–he might be there, that place she didn’t think to look, hadn’t worked...

For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a...

When my late father died — now I’m in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc.,...

Eby wanted to say so much to her. She wanted to say that waking up is the most important part of grieving, that so many women in their family failed to do it, and she...

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

The pain of your loss will return. Less, but still considerable. I know you’ve worked hard to release it, but it can still take hold of you. I will help you sing away the fury,...

You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really FEEL the loss.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn’t bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and...

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which...

The great love is gone. There are still little loves – friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no...

If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat, in...

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me…. You’ll be all right.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the...

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.

Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid....

There’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to...

Some of the most challenging work a suicide survivor can do is to pray. To pray fully, survivors must bring all of themselves to the prayer: their anger, disappointment, fears, insecurities, and why’s. I bring...

I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister’s and my own, and,...

Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don’t let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.

This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep...

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the...

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?

Samo si mene imao, osim onih grobova kod kuće, sad više nikog nemamo ni ti ni ja, ti si mene izgubio prije nego ja tebe, ili možda nisi, možda si mislio da stojim pred ovom...

Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.